Jim Carrey Almighty

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Titti Fabi / Retna Ltd. Say your prayers, Scientology—Jim Carrey and bestselling author Eckhart Tolle held their first meeting of a spiritual movement called GATE last week. Kim Masters on Carrey’s sermon.

Future Shock author Alvin Toffler and his wife, Heidi, once told me about a meeting they’d had with late Sony founder Akio Morita. They said he’d told them that if the electronics-firm idea hadn’t worked out, he had an alternative plan: starting a religion.

I flashed back to that story when I heard about last week’s inaugural meeting of the newly formed Global Alliance for Transformational Entertainment, or GATE, which Hollywood Reporter blogger James Hibberd described as “a newly formed outfit of producers and artists with a shared enthusiasm for New Age uplift.”

“I can do that in the stupidest movies,” Carrey continued. “Honestly. To me, Dumb and Dumber is a study of pre-egoic innocence, you know? And pre-egoic innocence can’t lose.”

Headlining the GATE gathering on the Fox lot were spiritual seeker Jim Carrey and Eckhart Tolle, the Oprah Winfrey-approved author of The Power of Now. She did a 10-week “webinar” on his book last year. (A Winfrey spokesperson says she is not associated with GATE or the event last week.)

At this scary point in history, people could use some spiritual uplift. And even in less troubling times, many in Hollywood have felt that yearning. The nature of stardom is so mystifying, even for many of those who possess it, that the hunger for a roadmap is great. That goes a long way toward explaining the appeal of the Church of Scientology and the Kabbalah Centre.

Last week’s invitation-only GATE event drew an audience of about 500 that included Adrian Grenier, Jackson Browne, Garry Shandling, and Virginia Madsen. Melissa Etheridge was among the speakers. And if you think this group isn’t serious about transformational entertainment, consider that the meeting continued for four hours. (Tolle teaches that time is an illusion so perhaps that was not a problem.)

Carrey himself has long been into a mixed-bag of spirituality—a filmmaker once told me that the actor “talked about Jesus, Gandhi, and Mohammed in a way that made me think he had not done the reading.” He’s been into Tolle for a while now and at the meeting, he explained that he’d come to an understanding that his thoughts were illusory and thought is responsible for “if not all, most of the suffering we experience”—Tolle in a nutshell.

Carrey described his spiritual awakening to his flock: “Suddenly I was thrown into this expansive, amazing feeling of freedom—from myself, from my problems. I saw that I was bigger than what I do. I was bigger than my body. I was everything and everyone. I was no longer a fragment of the universe—I was the universe.”

And being Jim Carrey, he managed to be funny while he was preaching. He asked the last person in the last row of the audience to call out her name.

“Andrea.”

“Are you aware that—do you have the distinct, palpable feeling that your intention helped create this evening?”

“Absolutely,” she replied promptly.

“Do you understand that all of this, this entire event, is happening inside you?”

A pause, then an uncertain, “Ye-e-e-s.” The audience laughed.

“I hope you can feel that,” Carrey said. “I hope you can understand that you are one of the creators of this evening. … And then I hope you are able to ask yourself—“Why did I get such a crappy seat?”

Carrey said that entertainers can relieve suffering and asked everyone leaving the GATE meeting to “plant seeds” and put a little of that “intention” in everything they do. Clearly the bar isn’t set too high. “I can do that in the stupidest movies,” Carrey continued. “Honestly. To me, Dumb and Dumber is a study of pre-egoic innocence, you know? And pre-egoic innocence can’t lose.”

(News, on the other hand, “is all this negativity condensed.... It really is not representative of what the world is or what the world wants.” Uh-oh.)

Tolle followed Carrey. Blogger James Hibberd is a fan and, unlike me, very familiar with Tolle’s teachings. He says Tolle “generally preaches against people distracting themselves with TV and movies.” But that’s not what he had to say in front of the Hollywood crowd. Instead he talked about movies in which he finds “even a hint of spiritual truth and transformation” because “transcendence” can come from movies. And those in which he finds such hints are as diverse as Groundhog Day, The Last Samurai and Titanic.

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